Like most of its Wall Street rivals, Deutsche Bank is wrestling with a pile of new rules in the US that will crimp the company's risk taking and profits. But the German bank has an extra challenge: overcoming its reputation as an outsider.

The 140 year old company has come a long way since its 1999 takeover of Bankers Trust. Adding the New York company bulked up Deutsche Bank's derivatives and bond trading businesses, and about 30% of the bank's investment banking revenue now comes from the US, fuelled by steady improvements in advising firms on mergers and raising money.

Still, the questions keep coming.

"How long are you staying? What do you know about US markets?" Michele Faissola, who runs the firm's interest rates and commodities units, says he has been asked by skeptical trading clients being wooed by Deutsche Bank. "Many investors in the US have a high barrier to switching."

The firm's latest push in the US is led by Anshu Jain, who runs Deutsche Bank's sales and trading operations and took over investment banking last year. The 48 year old Jain is spending more time in the US, flying in about once a month for meetings and to pitch potential clients.

The results are likely to be a factor in whether Jain succeeds Deutsche Bank chief executive Josef Ackermann in a widely expected shuffling of the company's top management during the next few years, analysts say.

Jain, who wouldn't discuss the company's succession plans, knows it can be hard to change people's minds. He was born in India and is based in London, and some outsiders claim his biggest drawback as a candidate to become chief executive of Germany's largest private sector bank is the fact that Jain doesn't speak German.

That hasn't hurt him in the US. After meeting with executives at American International Group, the insurer hired Deutsche Bank as the only non-US bank to become a global coordinator of a stock offering of possibly more than $20bn (€14.4bn) planned for this spring. The deal is a major part of AIG's plan to disentangle itself from US government ownership.

In January, Deutsche Bank helped lead a $1.7bn stock offering for Fifth Third Bancorp, a regional bank in Cincinnati that used the proceeds partly to repay a capital infusion from the Treasury Department.

"Now that leading Midwestern companies are choosing us as their global coordinator to raise equity, we feel that clients see us in the top tier of US banks," Jain said in an interview in his office at Deutsche Bank's US headquarters at 60 Wall Street. A Fifth Third spokeswoman declined to comment.

Jain, an avid cricket player and fan, jumped to the Frankfurt bank from Merrill Lynch in 1995. At the time, Deutsche Bank was a European powerhouse but had a tiny US presence. One money manager told Jain that the German bank would never break into the big leagues in the US.

In US bond trading, Deutsche Bank has the number one market share of 13%, according to a report last year by research firm Greenwich Associates. In 2008 and 2009, Deutsche Bank was ranked third, behind Barclays and JP Morgan Chase. But bond trading revenue trailed six other global banks, according to research compiled by Morgan Stanley.

The German bank's muscle in bonds has been weakened by the exit of some high profile traders who made huge wagers with the company's own money. Greg Lippmann, known for betting against the US housing market and helping to create an index that made it much easier for traders and hedge funds to short mortgages, left to start a hedge fund with his old boss.

In 2008, Jain shut down Deutsche Bank's big risk taking proprietary trading desks as part of an effort to reduce risk taking and focus more on serving clients. Now he is trying to figure out how to make more money without swinging for the fences.

Deutsche Bank has no plans to return to proprietary trading anytime soon, even though changes triggered by last year's Dodd Frank law give non US-based banks like Deutsche Bank, Barclays and Japan's Nomura more freedom than American banks to pursue such trading strategies. In 2008, Barclays and Nomura bought huge chunks of Lehman Brothers after the New York securities firm collapsed into bankruptcy.

"Given its outsized contribution to profitability, an investment bank is only as strong as its fixed income division," said Jain, who last year hired former Bear Stearns bond trading executive Jeffrey Mayer to bulk up Deutsche Bank's US push in stocks, bonds and investment banking, including by trying to get more business from existing clients.

One example: when a Deutsche Bank investment banker visited a South African retailer that was planning to sell a stake to Wal-Mart Stores, one of the firm's currency traders came along to tout the foreign exchange services offered by the bank.

In 2010, the businesses run by Jain generated $23.3bn in revenue, or about 70% of the company's total. But the company has a higher percentage of sell recommendations by analysts than most of its rivals, according Thomson Reuters.

"Although Deutsche Bank is executing well, the sustainability of investment banking earnings and uncertainty around legacy assets remain issues," Huw van Steenis, an analyst at Morgan Stanley, wrote in a recent report.